"So much so, Zoom published advice on how to keep uninvited morons out of private conferences."
That's half the problem solved then.
33002 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
I just checked to see if he was also the Tony Lewis who played for England and later became a cricket journalist. He wasn't. However the Wonkypedia entry for the player shows him as having died on April 1st as well. Outstanding coincidence or wonky editor? I'll settle for the latter whilst wondering of the statistician could have estimated the probability of the former.
What happens if those dual use products also have a use in medical equipment, say ventilators, which get exported to the US? One of the effects of globalisation is that it's not a big world any more. Or, to put it another way, it's difficult to shoot somebody else without your own foot getting in the way.
We're not quite the same - House name, Road name, Post town about 2 miles away. At least post code works for us. The other day I tried ordering something over the phone from the local pharmacist - their merchant S/W required a house number to verify a card payment over the phone.
And what's this "City" field so many forms have? I haven't lived anywhere that ranked as a city for the last third of a century.
OTOH they're the most reliable here. I've had all manner of problems with other carriers who seem to either lose stuff in their systems, deliver to the wrong house or simply not see a house name carved in 6" high letters on a block of stone. Under normal circumstances I prefer to get Amazon stuff delivered to a locker. Vendors' systems that can't cope with a house not having a number are another problem.
The posties, however, know us, would be able to deal with a misaddressed parcel and also know enough to link us and our daughter who lives a mile away and have been known to leave her parcels with us when they didn't have anywhere handy to leave it there. It's the sort of thing that happens out in the country!
And the years=old advice is don't click on any link in an unsolicited email. The fact that marketroids stuff their spam with links makes me think that they've never had that explained to them in words of one syllable and a 2 x 4. That in turn makes me realise that marketing departments are the easiest way in for anyone launching a malware attack. Between that and data hoarding they're a danger to any business.
According to the Register report on the previous breach they and the ICO have agreed to "an extension of the regulatory process", whatever that might mean until today. Somehow I doubt the ICO will be inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt over this. They have informed the ICO haven't they? There's no mention of it.
In the meantime Experian get to slurp a it more of their customers' data.
"The five-year contract with IBM nestles well with BT's intention to close the public switched telephone network by 2025."
I wonder. Applying the basic law of project timelines "close the PSTN by 2025" translates to "close the PSTN starting in 2025 at the earliest". When that happens we can reasonably expect customer support calls to go up just as the contract for supporting this system supporting customer service ends. From IBM's PoV the renewal nestles well with that, maybe from the BT side not so much.
Technically a good many pension funds were already wiped out* in that their assets didn't meet their predicted future liabilities.
Their managers may still be hoping the pandemic wipes out some of their liabilities**. However, as a member of one of those schemes I'm doing my best to frustrate that.
* Thanks largely to governments that enforced "payment holidays" based on over-optimistic projections and then became addicted to low interest rates than ensured the projections were even more over-optimistic than ever. It's in the nature of pensions that making up those missed payments is a good deal more onerous than making them at the time would have been.
** Realistically what they're probably most hoping for is a big increase in interest rates so that the payouts from their assets are restored to expected levels.
It might not be something that can be set up quickly - although a lot of other businesses seem to have managed it. However BT sells at least some of the technology to enable it so you might expect them to have moved a portion of the operation over to that if only to sample it for quality control let alone for business continuity preparedness. At least you would have expected them to if you hadn't had previous experience of BT management style.
Escalate? There's escalation? The only escalation I've come across was me walking to the village to find a couple of guys the operator didn't know about in manholes* redoing all the connections to the cabinets. The alternative escalation offered was an engineer visit for which I'd have been charge if no fault had been found - which there wouldn't have been as the maintenance would have been finished by then.
But only "not particularly surprised"? I doubt BT management has changed much in the last qusrter century or so** so not in the least surprised.
* Personholes if you prefer.
** Is it really that long? Nearly. Wow!
"The issue is, you're effectively an employee, that's why the law catches you."
If they were effectively employees then their effective employers wouldn't be ditching them now, they'd be getting 80% of their effective salaries from HMG. Or if they showed symptoms and had to self isolate their effective employer would be paying them sick pay and, again, getting support from HMG.
Oddly enough neither their effective employers nor HMG are doing any of these things so how do you make out that they're effective employees?
Slicing responsibility like that is a great way to spread the blame when things go wrong. It might be spread so thinly that everyone escapes blame. However it's a very effective means of ensuring that things go wrong. On the whole it's better to concentrate on avoiding blame by not having things go wrong in the first place.
"Unfortunately, that's not practical for any system that's more critical, as it requires storing the password in either plaintext or decryptable fashion."
Not quite true. The alternative is to generate all the off-by-one character passwords and store the hashes of those but it's an expensive way of enlarging your attack surface. I suspect a similar approach is taken for systems which ask you to type in letters 2,5 and 8 of your password.
"No issues with their product, but now they spam me every few days with their discount offers wanting me to order more. The amount I purchased should last me until about 2030 at the rate I use them."
Somehow I can't get rid of the idea that marketing and HR squabble over the same set of potential recruits.
" What matters to society is the quality of research being done, and the efficiency with which it is carried out.....it leads to more scientist duplicating effort in topics scientists like to study"
One of the things that drives quality of research is time spent trying to duplicate - actually replicate - others' results. If you don't do that you find that some dodgy stuff gets published. Read Feynman's comments, especially on psychological research.
Thanks for that.
Scrolling down the comments I find "An obvious confounding factor is the fact malaria is mostly in poor countries, and they probably have little testing and reporting of these cases." apparently from the blog owner. And this is the trouble with statistics. The factor which gives rise to the source of the correlation isn't necessarily the one that you're looking as but one which influences what you're taking as the independent variable.
I was brought up short on this a few days ago. Because my area (part of the old West Riding) is known to have escaped fairly lightly in the '18/'19 epidemic, probably because of a widely scattered rural population I looked at the recent confirmed cases as a percentage of population, as given on the Beeb's site, for different local govt. areas. The rates were very close between us and a similar area to the north. A ordering area which I think has a proportionally greater urban element (none of these areas are purely rural) had about twice as many cases as we have. Looking good. Then I tried another adjacent area which I thought comparable with the last and it fell in between. So did a more urban area. Then I tried another urban area and it had a significantly lower number of cases per head than mine. So am I looking at genuine incidences of disease or at health authorities with different testing policies (the almost identical area to ours is under the same health authority)?
The despatch points for most carriers seem to be at least 20 miles from where I live, the exception being Royal Mail at 2 miles.
The despatch depot can fill an entire van with parcels and set it trundling round the route - one round trip delivers many parcels. If the current drone problem is getting the payload up to one decent-sized parcel it sounds as if they haven't got near their real problem - a drone with the carrying capacity of a van to replace the multiple 40 mile return journeys per parcel.
Then, when we've got drones that size we have a whole new problem...